It’s an exchange that happens hundreds of times a day in coffee shops, bars and boardrooms all across Calgary. It goes something like this:

“I’m from Edmonton.”

One-one thousand …

“My condolences.”

Or, maybe, “We won’t hold that against you.”

There’s even the original, if incredulous, “It’s a fact that people from Edmonton smell.”

The insult seems to be requisite—a reflex, even. For those of us from Edmonton, it’s like listening to a four-year-old tell a knock-knock joke. We wait patiently to hear the tired old punchline because the budding comedian is just so delighted with the telling. The ribbing is just “part of the air that we breathe” because it’s ingrained in our history, says former Edmontonian Aritha van Herk, the author of Mavericks: an Incorrigible History of Alberta and a self-described “turncoat Calgarian.”

The origins of the smack down date to the beginnings of the two cities. First, says van Herk, the Canadian Pacific Railway chose to build its route through Rogers Pass and the “upstart little police fort called Calgary” in the 1880s. Edmonton was pissed. Then, in 1905, the guys running the show in Ontario rewarded their pals in Edmonton by naming it the provincial capital. Calgary was pissed. A few years later,

Alexander Rutherford, Alberta’s first premier, decided to build the University of Alberta in Strathcona, on the other side of the river from Edmonton, where he just happened to own a big chunk of land. He became rich and Calgary became “apoplectic,” van Herk says.

In more recent ancient provincial history—the 1980s—the Edmonton Oilers won five Stanley Cups. The Calgary Flames won one. Edmonton posted a sign at the edge of town welcoming travellers to “The City of Champions” and Calgary just got mad.

When van Herk arrived from Edmonton about 30 years ago, she was surprised by the “interesting comical hostility” she encountered.

“I thought ‘Oh, Calgarians really don’t like Edmontonians, do they?’”

A friend of mine who arrived here in the 1990s was shocked to be “accosted by a cashier” over the Edmonton address on a piece of her ID. “After that, I kept my mouth shut,” she says of her rude awakening to the Edmonton-Calgary rivalry.

Julie Phillips rolled into Calgary about four years ago. “When it comes up that I’m from Edmonton, I feel like my voice gets lower,” she says, which hasn’t stopped her from tirelessly supporting Calgary’s art scene as an organizer for Calgary 2012. “It’s like a code,” says Phillips. “They have to give someone a hard time in that first meeting and then you can get on with your business. But in that initial meeting, I feel a little bit shy about it.”

It may be undiagnosed Stockholm syndrome—or just comic genius—but Dave Kelly often dishes out Edmonton jokes himself because “it always gets a laugh.” Kelly, a Calgary media personality from Edmonton, says that no matter how lame the slag is, it works. “If I am emceeing something, I’ll say ‘Anybody here from Edmonton?’ Someone always claps, there’s a pause, and I say ‘I could always talk slower!’”

But Kelly is serious about the hockey. He and a lot of other Oilers fans try to blend in at the Saddledome (when the Oil aren’t on the ice).

“If Calgary scores a goal we may not sit on our hands, but we may be a half-second slower to stand up,” Kelly says.

Oilers fans in Calgary learn to cope. Take my brother: In 2004, during Calgary’s Stanley Cup run, a client presented him with a Flames jersey to wear to that night’s playoff game. So my bro did the gracious thing—he rushed home to put on his favourite Oilers T-shirt beneath it to make sure the red wouldn’t touch, and therefore pollute, his skin. Others, let’s call them the “Go Tampa Bay crowd,” would argue better dead than red.

There are no jerseys, just volunteers customizing their T-shirts in the rivalry between the cities’ two folk music festivals, says Karen Ball, executive director of Calgary 2012 and a “closet Edmontonian.” But other than that “huge throwdown,” she doesn’t see much evidence among Calgary artists of hostility toward Edmonton. Rather, she’s admired for the artistic street cred she brings from Whyte Avenue. No one has offered her their condolences (at least not yet). “That is so crazy,” Ball says. “I always assumed in my little shielded bubble of the arts that people from Calgary didn’t care, that people from Calgary were like‘Edmonton, whatever.’”

But Todd Hirsch, senior economist at ATB, regularly finds himself defending his home town in the business and social arenas. “I don’t think people actually hate Edmonton. It’s good-natured ribbing but, still, it’s out of ignorance,” he says. “I always ask, ‘When was the last time you were there?’”

Hirsch admits to an “emotional soft spot” for the city where he grew up, something shared by most of us, regardless of our home towns. I, for one, remember long debates over pints of beer at the University of Alberta with a group of friends from Calgary who would speak of these mysterious chuckwagon races, miraculous chinooks and majestic mountains only an hour to the west.

My journey from Edmonton to Calgary was roundabout and included stops in Toronto, St. John’s and Vancouver. While I missed out on the curve in Highway 2 near Ponoka, taking the scenic route taught me that cities are like different pieces of fruit, each with its own distinct charms—apples and oranges if you will.

But the special scorn in Calgary for the orange (and blue) creates a lovely club of Edmontonians. While the other half of Calgary’s population can easily spot each other’s green face paint and watermelon helmets, those of us from Edmonton have a quieter kinship than members of the Rider Nation.

When Edmontonians discover one another, we quickly swap high schools and graduation years. Time and place established, within seconds a lawyer at a Stampede party confesses his Grade 3 crush, a woman at a Christmas party happily points out former classmates, a business guru at a backyard gathering whispers a crack about the ’88 Olympics (a sacred cow in these parts).

Edmontonians in Calgary unite, usually with an eye roll over the latest barb against “Deadmonton.” It’s kind of like the look you surreptitiously give your brother when your mom launches into the same story she’s been telling since 1985.

Only you can insult your own family, van Herk says. “When we insult Toronto we’re pissy about it. But when we insult Edmonton, it’s with affection.”

Kelly agrees. “I’ll trash talk and pick on my brother until somebody goes after the family and then we both pound on them. It’s the same thing. The way to get rid of the trash talk is to bring up Toronto.”

Something that’s easily done when everyone in Alberta knows it’s a fact that people from Toronto smell.

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